ProducingEach year, more than 1000 movies are released. Bollywood, India’s HindiFilm industry NollywoodThe NigerianVersion, have outpaced the CaliforniaDream-makers who believe they are the rulers of the world. Hollywood.
It is against this shift in the shaping of global culture that “Nollywood Dreams,” a giddy if wobbly comedy by Jocelyn BiohThe play out.
ButThis template is pure MGM. Our sweet heroine, Ayamma Okafor (Sandra Okuboyejo), works, along with her tart sister Dede (Nana Mensah), in their parents’ travel agency in Lagos. WhenThe rising film director Gbenga Ezie (Charlie Hudson III) announces open auditions for the title role in his latest project, “The Comfort Zone” — yes, there’s a title role — Ayamma sees a chance to “be like the women in all of those Hollywood films I spent my life watching” and become a star herself.
ThereThere are complications, sure, but this comedy is only 90 minutes long. Gbengahas almost assured the role ComfortTo his former lover Fayola Ogunleye (Emana Rachelle), a somewhat tarnished star known as “the Nigerian Halle BerryWith Tina Turner Legs.” AndWhat is it? Wale Owusu (Ade Otukoya), Nigeria’s “Sexiest Man Born,” slated to play the hero in the movie and perhaps in Ayamma’s life as well? What, indeed!
If this sounds more like a soap opera than a film, that’s because NollywoodIn the early 1990s, the art of staging the play was still in its infancy. (Bioh writes in an introduction to the script that movies of that period, which she watched as a child, were low budget, “shot with very limited takes” and heavily dependent on improvisation.) HalfThe joy of Saheem Ali’s staging for MCC TheaterThe, which was opened on ThursdayNight, is in observing the drawbacks that are borrowed by West AfricansThese are the selling points for a new aesthetic.
Or perhaps an old one: “Nollywood Dreams” is spirited and casual, with the knockabout rhythms and narrative shortcuts of HollywoodIt was in its early days, before flickers turned into films. On Arnulfo Maldonado’s shape-shifting set, the action cuts between three locations: the travel agency, Gbenga’s office and a television studio where the beloved talk-show host Adenikeh, “the Nigerian Oprah Winfrey,” conveniently interviews the other characters so they can provide bald updates on the plot.
AsThe actor who plays the role of the unnamed actor AbenaHe was a beautiful woman. Anne PageIn Bioh’s adaptationOf “The Merry Wives of Windsor” this summer, Adenikeh exemplifies the play’s twinned pleasures. WhileTranslating Oprah’s AmericanFloridization of mannerisms NigerianOne of her many strengths is that she offers a warped funhouse version of the original. That’s a neat double flip BiohSticks throughout the play InHer characters being worshipped AmericanBrandsSteven Spielberg, “Chicken SoupFor the Soul,” N.Y.U.) She makes light fun of both.
That’s by now a Bioh trademark. “School Girls; OrThe African Mean Girls Play,” a hit for MCC in 2017, wrings all possible laughs (and a few impossible ones) out of its Ghanaian variation on familiar mean-girl tropes — while also offering, underneath the genre trappings, a critique of AmericanCultural imperialism “Merry Wives” is similarly complex, finding doubles for Shakespeare’s characters among the Africandiasporic community South Harlem.
If “Nollywood Dreams” is not quite as successful as those previous works, it’s at least in part because BiohWe set out to make the new play as light and easy as possible. Like GbengaProducers in the United States to “write movies about what they assumed was my experience” — which is to say, war and poverty — she was determined in “Nollywood Dreams” to focus on what’s “funny and wild and silly.” InRecent profile in The New York Times, she recalled a literary manager who despite admiring the play expressed surprise at its happy characters; hadn’t she read about Boko Haram?
Thank you. BiohWe declined to interpolate this NigerianTerrorist group to the action. TooFew playwrights are gifted at comedy. She is one of the few who can provide zingers and the structures that make them work.
Play about early fun and makeshiftness NollywoodFilms are given a fun, if not perfect, treatment. Form follows dysfunction. Ali’s direction emphasizes color and comfort over snap and discipline. (Dede Ayite’s costumes nail all four.) The downside is occasional bagginess, as in the overlong audition scenes; “The Comfort Zone,” a love triangle in which a man must choose between his haughty AmericanThe humble wife and the husband Nigerian sweetheart, is so deliberately bad that we cannot register, as we’re evidently meant to, Ayamma’s skill in performing it.
ButThen AyammaThe only character that has not been forcibly enlisted is Bioh’s fun-at-all-costs agenda; OkuboyejoYou can trust her to be warm and sane. The others are all over-the-over-the-top caricatures, hardly distinguishable from those in the films they make. (EvenPeople aren’t always as magnetically smooth in movies as they appear. Otukoya’s WaleYou can seduce anyone by simply draping your arm across a sofa. ToMake it personal. Bioh buttons the play with a spoof trailer for “The Comfort Zone” that’s both sincere and hilarious, a kiss and a kiss-off.
FairIt is funny enough, but comedy can’t help but touch tragedy. “Nollywood Dreams” evidently means to do so as well; Bioh sees in “The Comfort Zone” the “sad duality” of a country in which people have the choice to “live like the rich” by participating in the unjustness of society “or suffer like the poor” by refusing. “There is,” she writes, “no middle.”
How “The Comfort Zone” — let alone the play that contains it — represents that idea I was unable to fathom. As subtext it’s in any case too sub to provide adequate ballast for the comedy. If only against the high standard of “School Girls,” that makes “Nollywood Dreams” feel slightly unmoored — which wouldn’t matter if AmericanComedy is more like humor Nigerian film. InIf that were the case, then there would be 999 productions just like it. They will soon be at your theater.
Nollywood Dreams
Through Nov. 28 at the MCC Theater, Manhattan; mcctheater.org. RunningTime: 1 hour and 30 minutes
Source: NY Times
